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Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

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Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#51
post #48
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ad team prevailed, this person said. Of course they did. A controversial idea, but you know how much easier this would be for everyone if Google offered an option for users to be paid for volunteering your information to them? It's a precedent most fledgling ad companies wouldn't be able to match... even if it's just a few dollars a month, or maybe 30ish bucks a year. It'd cut into Google's bottom line, but it…

What would be better is the ability to pay for Google not to sell your data. However, the new problem would be making sure they aren't selling your data, anyway.

Google Contributor: https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#52
post #40
post #32

> "The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising an…

> The ad team prevailed, this person said. Of course they did. A controversial idea, but you know how much easier this would be for everyone if Google offered an option for users to be paid for volunteering your information to them? It's a precedent most fledgling ad companies wouldn't be able to match... even if it's just a few dollars a month, or maybe 30ish bucks a year. It'd cut into Google's bottom line, but it…

Isn't the competition already mostly eradicated, except for Facebook? The other ad companies are orders of magnitude smaller.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#53
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be better is the ability to pay for Google not to sell your data. However, the new problem would be making sure they aren't selling your data, anyway.

Google Contributor: https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing

That does not include Google's services and only includes a handful of sites.

I also see nothing about not still collecting information about you. It appears to just remove showing you some ads.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#54
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have the feeling that the amount of links to Bloomberg articles on HN significantly increased in the past months. I'm not a fan of that though, because Bloomberg articles seldomly cover really new topics or add in-depth information. Which is fine, as Bloomberg's audience is a different one than HN's, isn't it?

Well, at least they're quoting and Google source with specifics instead of just relying on source code, docs and speculation.

I'll trust code over an anonymous comment any day. But maybe I'm biased. If you see speculation in a Fuchsia Friday article that you disagree with, I'm always open to intelligent discussion.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#55
post #23
post #15

> "Switching away from Android could provide Google the opportunity to hit the reset button on any mistakes they believe they made a decade ago,". "They might be able to regain some power that they’ve ceded to device manufacturers and telecom carriers." How making a new OS achive this? What kind of problems Fuchsia could solve when Linux can’t solve? I personally hope Fuchsia would remain as an experimental project.…

One of Android's major headaches is that Linux does not have a stable driver interface. Interfaces within linux change regularly, but only drivers that are checked into the main tree are updated. If you maintain a driver outside of that tree, you will experience pain. That's how Android operated and why it's linux kernel rarely changed (and why doing OS updates for phones was so hard). Android has been trying to fix…

> Interfaces within linux change regularly, but only drivers that are checked into the main tree are updated.

This is why all of the Google's code sits in one big repo (reportedly). It allows them to refactor all dependent code at once when changing interfaces.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#56
post #25

Apparently it uses a micro kernel, zircon. I'm curious about this kernel, honestly making something new from the ground up doesn't seem like a good idea. I wonder how much of an advantage it was for android to use linux as a kernel, but I guess it was a gigantic advantage, which let them focus on what mattered in the development of android. Other question: any kernel/OS developer here to explain if a micro kernel mak…

> making something new from the ground up doesn't seem like a good idea.

It isn't actually terribly difficult, the most difficult part being driver support. By using Linux as a base, Google gained a lot of driver support by default, among other things like a well-known base environment.

> explain if a micro kernel makes his job easier or harder

Well, a microkernel usually has well-defined interfaces that allow drivers to communicate with the kernel, instead of these interfaces being decided by the compiler at compile-time. This in turn offers the guarantees of "ABI/API stability" that the Linux kernel usually offers to userspace programs: drivers don't need to be recompiled to work with a new kernel, so you can actually have binary drivers that continue to "work" long after the vendor stopped working on them. This also offers more room for stability guarantees (a driver that crashes can be restarted, as it's not the kernel panicking), and security (drivers don't have access to each other's data).

On the other hand, you trade a bit of performance and flexibility (from the developer's perspective) for this, by committing not to break compatibility. By now, advantages and inconvenient of microkernels vs monolithic ones are well understood and documented.

What's in for Google is mostly licensing-related: since they're making it; they are free to pick their favourite license. And I am pretty sure Google has been uncomfortable with the GPL for a while now. The same could be said about its hardware partners, and manufacturers that have to provide the source code for their drivers (when they comply at all).

Since a GPL kernel is one of the best things that happened to Android so far (allowing custom roms, open source projects, more transparency), I am extremely weary of fuschia, and looking forward to postmarketos as an alternative to android.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#58
Did anyone think maybe using a pinkish shade for a Second System codename is asking for it to fail?

Apple had a Project Pink back in '88 to be the successor to System Software 6. They hoped to release it in 1993, instead buying NeXT in 1997 and launching OS X in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Pin...

Microsoft's Project Pink was the result of their Danger acquisition. It didn't fare well either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

I wish Google the best of luck.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#59
This article seems to have gone through multiple edits to correct all of the incorrect technical facts, but it looks like they still have work to do.

Shifting away from using Linux would help Google’s legal case that its software isn’t reliant on Oracle.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#60
"One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project."

This has been my therory for a while. You see all these different projects competing against each other (multiple messaging apps are a good example) and you think: why is Google so unfocused? But what Google basically wants to do is hoard engineers so they don't leave and go work for competitors and make them stronger (or start their own companies that could compete against Google).

So Google's management figured out that if they give these enginners some cool stuff to work on, they'll stay at the company, even if the stuff they work on is a duplicate of something else the company has already done.

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